Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and top Pentagon brass are claiming that the
lives of Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers have been put at risk by the
leak of some 92,000 classified documents about the Afghan War, waving
the bloody shirt (even if they don't yet have one).

Referring to the leaker and WikiLeaks, the
Web site which distributed the documents, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that "the truth is they might
already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of
an Afghan family."

Gates cited the need to examine the
documents to assess potential dangers to soldiers and civilians. "We
have a moral obligation, not only to our troops but to those who have
worked with us," Gates said, adding that he had called the FBI into an
expanding criminal investigation of the leak.

However, the intensifying rhetoric against
WikiLeaks and the chief leaking suspect, Pfc. Bradley Manning,
obscures two crucial points:

First, the U.S. military itself has put
countless Afghanis (and Iraqis) in harm's way by pressing (or bribing)
them to cooperate with the occupying forces. Indeed, the military has
publicized these collaborations by having the news media film meetings
between American officers and local leaders, as a sign of supposed U.S.
progress in winning their hearts and minds.

Especially in Iraq, many Sunnis who agreed
to take U.S. money and join the so-called Awakening have been killed
in retaliatory attacks. Similar killings have occurred in Afghanistan,
in areas like Marja where U.S. troops claimed to have established
security only to find the Taliban returning at night to take revenge on
Afghan officials and residents working with the Americans.

More broadly, it could be argued that
President George W. Bush's invasions and botched occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq have led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of
thousands of civilians, making any suggestion that Manning and
WikiLeaks may have some additional blood on their hands both
hypothetical and hypocritical.

Secondly, the main reason for leaks is
that the U.S. government has engaged in vastly over-classifying its
"secrets," thus reducing the ability of the American people to debate
life-or-death issues of war and peace and undermining the concept of
an informed electorate in a democracy.

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Personal Experience

In my career as an investigative reporter
covering national security issues, I have often encountered both the
problem of over-classification on relatively innocuous information and
the desire of government officials to hide truths that the people had a
right to know.

Indeed, Consortiumnews.com, which I
founded in 1995, was one of the first if not the first
investigative Web site to disclose classified U.S. government documents
on the Internet. We did so because I had come into possession of
secret documents that shed light on an important chapter of American
history, the so-called October Surprise case of 1980.

The documents helped explain how
Republicans gained power in that pivotal election year allegedly
through a treacherous dirty trick, sabotaging President Jimmy Carter's
negotiations with Iran to free 52 American hostages before the 1980
election. However, by the time I found the documents in the mid-1990s,
there was no interest among more traditional U.S. news outlets,
including The New Yorker magazine, to use these documents.

Apparently the disinterest stemmed from
the widely held view that the October Surprise case was a discredited
"conspiracy theory." But the secret documents told a different story.

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So, on the advice of my oldest son, Sam,
we started the Consortiumnews.com Web site and revealed the documents
in an eight-part series that I dubbed "The October Surprise X-Files."

The documents included a confidential
cable from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow translating a January 1993 report
from the Russian parliament about what Soviet-era intelligence files
revealed about the October Surprise case.

The Russian Report corroborated
longstanding allegations that Republicans did strike a deal with the
Iranians behind Carter's back, a determination that contradicted the
conclusion of a congressional task force which had claimed to find "no
credible evidence" of Republican guilt.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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